Breaking up Is Hard to Do
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Breaking Up is Hard to Do Men, Women, and Punctuation in Warhol’s Novel a Gilda Williams Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margins of a completely erased text. ― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet My mind is like a tape recorder with one button – ERASE. ― Andy Warhol, From A to B and Back Again. THE Philosophy of Andy Warhol Punkuation Before emoji’s, there was plain old punctuation. Long before capital ‘D’ meant ‘big toothy sideways grin’, ordinary commas, colons, and dashes instructed readers when to smile, weep, or frown. A semi-colon inserted in the dialogue of a 19th-century novel – the briefest hesitation in fluid conversation – was the expressive equivalent of a raised eyebrow. Typographic symbols themselves might be abbreviations of feeling; the exclamation point may originate from the Latin word Io, meaning ‘joy’, with the ‘I’ written above the ‘o’. Canyouimagineaworldwithoutbrakesorpunctuation The laws of correct punctuation stir heated opinion, often producing severe verdicts: only a fool riddles solid prose with careless little marks. ‘If you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate’, admonishes novelist Cormac McCarthy, who admits only periods and the occasional comma into his sparse writing. A 1939 English style guide listed no fewer than 157 rules for punctuation. ‘Punctuation should be seen and not heard’, commanded another rulebook, suggesting that disobedience would merit the discipline due a misbehaving child. Elsewhere these non-verbal signs are likened to musical symbols: directing the text’s rhythm; indicating when to change pitch or volume; eventually slowing the pace down and taking a rest. Another music/language connection was adopted by Liz Kotz in her study, Words to be Looked at: Language in 1960s Art (MIT 2010), which draws together John Cage’s nearly blank score for 4’33” (1952) with 1960s language experiments, from Douglas Huebler to Andy Warhol, particularly his novel a (1968): Warhol relocates reading as an experience of the murmur and babble, the lapses of attention and intelligibility, and the starts and stops of talk and noise and interruption that are the condition of meaning, but also its constant undoing. How exactly did Andy Warhol load the page with ‘murmurs and babbles’, ‘starts and stops’, ‘noises and interruptions’? The answer, abundantly evidenced in Derek Beaulieu’s a a novel (2017) – this digitally erased version, which leaves only the additions of punctuation and incidental sound – is that a relied enormously on its team of uncredited transcribers. The active contribution of this fluctuating group of poorly paid young women is habitually ignored: negligible at best, risible at worst. Beaulieu’s pages envision a renewed assessment of their work, foregrounding the labours of this under-paid and under-aged Factory underclass. For a a novel, poet Derek Beaulieu first scanned into Photoshop every page of the 1998 Grove Press edition and then digitally wiped them, manually erasing all unwanted text while preserving the typist’s insertions. Beaulieu is akin in spirit to another noted conceptual poet, Kenneth Goldsmith (also a Warhol specialist; coincidence?), who famously erased the words in Gertrude Stein’s essay ‘On Punctuation’, isolating on the page her floating commas, periods, hyphens, and apostrophes. Derek Beaulieu’s a a novel is similarly a stand-alone work of art, in some ways fulfilling with more rigor Warhol’s promise of ‘found’ text. But Beaulieu’s ‘words to be looked at’ importantly bring to light the labour/gender divide underpinning the machinations of the Factory. Beaulieu finally pays Warhol’s overlooked team their due tribute, and a a novel becomes a visually intoxicating treatise on an invisible, collaborative labour concealed within the folds of art history. Boys Taping, Girls Typing Consider Paul Carroll’s account of a in his sensationalist Playboy profile (Sept 1969), ‘What’s a Warhol?’: Last winter, Warhol wrote his first ‘novel’. He calls it a. It consists of 451 pages of totally unedited manuscript transcribed from tapes Warhol made as he followed Ondine for 24 hours as he gossiped, quarreled, wooed and talked with friends, lovers, enemies, waitresses and cabdrivers. At first, a strikes most as a bore. Most of the time you can’t tell who is talking to whom about what; moreover, all misspellings made by the high school girls who transcribed the tapes were religiously reprinted, as were all typographical errors; and at least a third of the sentences simply make no sense whatsoever. But gradually two elements begin to fascinate. Ondine emerges as a witty, irreverent, and engaging character; and it becomes obvious that this is how most people actually sound as they talk to one another. a is a genuine microcosm of the world of words, fractured sentences, grunts, giggles, commands, pleas, rhetoric, pop-tune titles, squawks from taxi radios, TV-commercial diction, the oblique, sometimes radiantly direct idiom of the heart and the blablabla that surrounds us every day and often far into the night. Carroll’s admiring tone is rare – most reviewers demolished a – but his chronicle of the book’s production rehearses a familiar script. Despite halting at a’s self-description as a novel, Carroll repeats the publicity surrounding the book: that Warhol and Ondine adhered to a continuous 24- hour schedule (they didn’t); that the manuscript was ‘totally unedited’ (it wasn’t). Arnold Leo, the patient Grove editor who resurrected the languishing project, and Billy Name – Warhol’s ever- loyal, multi-talented, resident Fixer – heavily reworked the first draft by adding speakers’ names, italicizing sound, formatting text, and more. In Carroll’s depiction, the all-female typing pool is a nameless and skill-free bunch, their typo-ridden contribution just another incidental layer of chaos in the creation of ‘readymade’ text. Recognizable only by virtue of their mistakes, the ‘high school girls’ are hardly acknowledged as contributing to the recreation of ‘how most people actually sound’. Ondine emerges almost miraculously as the novel’s worthy star, surviving against all odds the inept editorial support. Beaulieu’s a a novel visually attests to the complexity of the young women’s input, and the overlapping registers of meaning translated to the printed page: − non-verbal interjections: (Moxi laughs.) ( he av y br eaths ) SNORE / SNORE (Pause.) − action and context: ( on ph one ) (rustling paper) (at a distance) (he blows into the microphone) − tone of voice: (yelling) (slyly) (In a funny voice.) (whispers) (mimicky laughter) (Rink mumbles in a high voice) − onomatopaiea, human: (Gasp.) Gurgle. (She wheezes.) (continues rapping in the distance) − onomatopeia, machines and objects: (slam) (roll bang clang a oll bang ) ( Cr ack Br ack ) (Click.) − urban backdrop: (Sirens) RADIO ( H O N K ) (traffic) (Sink drains.) (Rain.) − the indecipherable: (Billy says something) (?) (blip/censor) (Strange sounds –like a space craft conversation.) Some of the typist’s insertions impress as well-worded and evocative: - (3 slumbering breaths) (rather Gregorian chant) ( tatte r ed voice ) (60-second pause and the sound of washing feet.) (Sighs of relief and music.) These read like private messages whispered from inside the text, or stage directions written by a poet. Plus the typists were required to disentangle distant, muffled, or overlapping conversations; identify multiple speakers’ voices; and capture Ondine’s rapid-fire stream-of-consciousness: ‘je ne sais pas WHAT to do’! Like the beleaguered princess in the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale, the young women were tasked with spinning Warhol’s tangled heap of audio-tape into literary gold, with only the tricks of language to save them. The typists presumed that, following their first rough draft, corrections would be made; this never occurred. According to Leo, most transcribing was done by Cathy Naso, Iris Weinstein, and ‘this girl Brooky, whose last name we don’t know’. In chapter 2 the young women are identified as Cappy Tano (a play on capitano, Italian for ‘captain’?) and Rosalie Goldberg (later ‘Rosilie’, ‘Risilee’). On tape 18 Ondine addresses the girls directly as ‘Rosilie–Capry–and Gookie’. According to Vincent Bockris, Maureen Tucker – drummer for the Velvet Underground – was also enlisted, turning out to be a superb typist. Apparently she refused to type up any swear words: a cleaning-up of language which Beaulieu spreads to the whole text, bleaching out all spoken language. Susan Pile – a Barnard student and capable wordsmith who went on to contribute to Interview – began transcribing from chapter 15. The story goes that the girls sometimes softened unkind comments – but cranked up the nastiness in some innocent remarks as well. Warhol, they say, mischievously tweaked the manuscript this way too. Rough and Ready/Rough and Readymade Scholars and actors alike have expressed their gratitude for Shakespeare’s later punctuators, who modernized the bard’s words by transforming, for example, Shylock’s run-on ‘What what what ill lucke ill lucke’ into ‘What, what, what? Ill luck, ill luck?’ in The Merchant of Venice. No such appreciation for a’s punctuators, who figure in the anecdotal history as non-entities. Ondine half-jokingly claims to ‘admire those girls because they were ... complete slaves.’ In fact by job’s end they were paid – thanks to a raise – $25 a week. Naso was also rewarded by Warhol with a Flowers painting and a Self-Portrait, making hers perhaps the highest paid after-school job in history. In his 1960s memoir Popism, Warhol refers somewhat condescendingly to ‘the little typists’ or the ‘little high school girls’, busy ‘transcribing down to the last stutter some reel-to-reel tapes of Ondine’ before proceeding to complain that the ‘little girls [were] really slow’. They hadn’t exactly been recruited for their ace secretarial skills. Like everyone else at the Factory, the principal qualification was a burning desire just to be there.